[OSGeo-Board] OSGeo status regarding implementation of standards

[Arnulf Christl]

On Sat, November 4, 2006 01:24, Jo Walsh wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 04:15:34PM -0800, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
>> > "OSGeo serves as a testbed and safe space for standards prototype
>> > development... in the hope that these community driven standards
>> > may grow into full-fledged OGC or W3C specifications..."
>>
>> I might have added a "where needed or appropriate" clause to the end,
>> and might tweaked to read "safe space for *open* standards", but that's
>> just me being a fuss-budget...  Looks just fine really.
>
> I would humbly suggest that if we make any kind of announcement / PR
> statement then can we wait a little while until more WMS-T
> implementations are on the stack, some nice demos set up and it can
> be more, "look at all this great stuff the community is pulling together"
> and not so much "here we are winsomely trying to defuse any angst
> maybe experienced by people in more fearful/competitive cultures".

Hey Jo,
thats me, fearfully competing with angst diffused by patent loaded world
dominating corporations threatening to undermine and take apart our small
offbeat culture of long haired student hackers.

The legal implications that I refer to are not that offbeat. We are still
fighting over patent issues in the EU and during this fight I deliberately
had to educate myself on propietary business models and how patents fit
into them. The idea is that big corporations exchange patents in order to
dominate the market together something like ~ if you cant't kill it, team
up with it.
The most recent example is Microsoft and Novell. Ha, Microsoft is not
going anywhere near producing Open Source and is not giving up any
"intellectual proprietary" rights it claims to have. More so if you read
carefully you will see that the patent ceasefire of Microsoft against
Linux is limited to Novell's *GNU Linux* SuSE and only that (how can any
GNU Linux be owned at all?). Grudgingly extended to the Open SuSE
community [1] because they (Novell) are actually getting an added value
out of them (exploit the community) and cannot afford to turn them away.

Open standards aint any better than software when laywers knock on your
door and I'd rather have them knock on the OGC's door than on ours -
because they made this their job.

I don't know but it looks like a similar issue: Why did GeoRSS go into
OGC? Who was offended and why? Did anybody lose anything? Is the
development of the standard endangered by this process? Is anybody
excluded to use or implement this standard? (I am not being rhetorical but
ignorant of the answers to these questions).

> I like the *open* emphasis.

Yes, Open is cool. Now we just need to add Free too. I heard someone
speaking of the OGC drifting too much direction ISO - yes they seem do
that and that is definitely not a Free way to go. I would really not want
to have OSGeo de facto standards - um - ways-to-do-things turn into OGC
standards and then get messed up by ISO. But that's just me being a
FOSS-budget...

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1]
''Microsoft and Novell felt it was important to establish a precedent for
the individual, non-commercial open source developer community that
potential patent litigation need not be a concern. Microsoft is excited to
more actively participate in the open source community and Novell is and
will continue to be an important enabler for this bridge. For these
reasons, both Novell and Microsoft felt it was appropriate to make this
pledge for Microsoft not to assert its patents against the non-commercial
community.''

The intention is to discredit all Open Source development (except by
Novell or Tinyhard) as an "individual, non-commercial open source
developer community". The people working in my office are not protected by
this fake new openness because they working in a commercial environment.
Turn it the other way round, we are not a company but a non-commercial
bunch of leisure hackers.

> cheers,
>
>
> jo

-- 
Arnulf Christl
http://www.ccgis.de